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Those Shades Whom Love Cut Off: A Romance

by Daniel Paul Lawson

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Traditionally, romances are composed to convey heartfelt tenderness and personal sentiment. In keeping with this tradition, I chose to write this piece with a specific romantic subject in mind: the lustful affair between Francesca da Rimini and her lover Paola Malatesta.

Dante Alighiera recounts their affair in the first part of his Divine Comedy, Inferno. In Canto V, Dante enters the second ring of Hell, an arena in which a swirling vortex of souls is forever spinning. These souls, or shades, are damned to eternally and cyclically soar in the inescapable maelstrom, a doom that mirrors their inescapable lust they chose to fall into in life. After surveying the souls for a moment, Dante is introduced to Francesca and Paolo. The pair float down, “just as doves,” and Francesca begins to tell their tale.

Just as Dante lets Francesca narrate, I let the flute tell Francesca’s tragic story: of wedding days gone awry, of fits of passion interrupted, and of a double slaying due to sexual sin.

The piece was conceived as both tormented and peaceful, distorted and beautiful— paralleling the love between Francesca and Paolo. Their love was true but forbidden, wholesome but punishable. And for their love, they are condemned to everlasting affliction in the unending, undulating sea of aching souls.

“Nothing is more painful than to recall the time of happiness in wretchedness,” Francesca says to Dante. Those Shades Whom Love Cut Off strives to capture both the happiness remembered and the wretched suffering endured.

credits

released February 8, 2011
Carolyn Brown, flute
Daniel Paul Lawson, piano

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all rights reserved

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